Page:The Lessons of the German Events (1924).djvu/31



The October defeat was no defeat, for there was no fight. It was rather a collapse, a complete rejection of the Party.

When one compares the three reports, one sees that the first report of the Central Executive and Brandler's report belong together. You can judge them as you like, they have a consistent line of policy, and this consistent theory is accompanied by a bad German practice.

What Remmele said amounts to an attempt on the part of certain very good people to depose of things, which they cannot otherwise explain, by regarding them as errors, as the results of a definite, and to them dangerous, policy. And consequently the fact that for a year and a half Remmele had been holding himself back, that he reacted during the Friesland and the Levi crises, and is now again reacting, is an indication that a reaction is setting in within the Party against a very typical liquidationism and revisionism. Comrades, if we oppose this revisionism so vigorously it is because in the development of our Party the Levi and the Friesland crises were the first severe liquidation crises we passed through. In those crises we learned to look behind the masks and formulas for causes and theoretical foundations which must lead to practical consequences.

What was here expressed by the Executive representative and by Brandler, denotes the beginning of a liquidation crisis, not only within the German Communist Party, but within the whole Communist International. There was such a crisis after the Third World Congress. It is to be explained by the backwash of the revolution in Europe, and in Germany particularly by the defeat in the March action.

The Third Congress met the backwash of the revolutionary wave with the slogan for the winning over and rallying of the masses for the seizure of power. And this correct change of position the liquidators of the German Party transformed into the revision of Communism, the rejection of the Communist Party as such; they derived from it such conclusions as that we must return to the methods of the Social-Democratic Party. And, comrades, they did return, and every Berlin worker who reads Vorwarts sees the signature "Ediot, Ernst Reuter," and thinks of the bitter experience we have passed through.

Comrades, the crisis in the Communist International was never completely overcome. It is true that we made certain expulsions, drove out Fossard, or perhaps he left of his own accord; we also expelled a few in Germany. But the theoretical analysis was never made which is essential if our workers are to understand that a breach of discipline is meant not in the sense of organisation but in the sense of policy. An attempt was made to formulate the matter a little more carefully in order to restrain the working class